Abstract

Determining the propagation direction of waves in a wavefield is important in several seismic imaging techniques and applications. This can be achieved using the Poynting vector method, but it performs poorly when waves overlap, returning incorrect wave amplitude and direction. An alternative, the local slowness method, is capable of separating overlapping waves, but suffers from low angular resolution. We describe modifications of these two approaches that improve the ability to extract the wave amplitude propagating in different directions. The primary modification is the addition of a wavefront orientation separation step. We evaluate the original and modified methods' ability to separate six overlapping waves in a constant velocity model and find that the modifications significantly improve the results.